It was in 1981 when John Zeisel’s book “Inquiry by design” was published. I was quite fortunate for getting hold of the book when I was studying at IIT Kharagpur.
The book explained quite clearly the iterative process that he recommended for the design process. The irony is that we architects adopted it rather loosely (if indeed some of us adopted it!) But the software industry, uses almost exactly the same spiral/cyclic process of designing via iterations. I am not sure if they read that book, but when I learned about the way they worked I found it quite ironical that we did not adopt it ourselves; as it had so much power and flexibility
It would be nice if others here can reply to this topic and opine on the use of such iterative processes or is there something else that gets used?